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Predominantly black would indicate whoever drew the districts was trying to suppress the pull of the black population, no?
Correct, they draw crazy maps that try to put as many minorities as possible in as few districts as possible so their votes while concentrated and maybe get a seat or two, prevent getting many more seats that their votes and locations would warrant.
Yep, it's called Gerrymandering.
Edit - The illegal part is when Republicans make less predominantly minority districts than they are required to by the Voting Rights Act.
It's baffling that with todays technology it hasn't gone to mathematically distributed zones with none of the bullshit humans create, which can then be reviewed by a non partisan group to ensure nothing fucked up.
Anyone who gerrymanders (dem or gop) knows they'd lose if it happened.
Yes, keeping the power is the reason both sides do it. And even if a non partisan group were to approve them, the GOP has been messing with them to suppress minorities and then just dragging their feet in changing them, or changing but in the same bad way and then running out the clock until it's "too close to the election to change the maps now". Then if they change afterwards they already got what they wanted, and then just rinse and repeat next time.
In this case the article describes the opposite. There was one predominantly black district (out of six, and 1/3 the population are black) that the state was forced essentially forced to split in two. In the article I think they even mention civil rights groups prefer the two districts.
There are two ways of fucking with district maps. The one you are thinking of is "packing," which puts as many voters as possible in one district. Another is "cracking," which spreads a large number of voters (who could win their own district-sized contest) across several other districts. This contested map seems to be undoing a "cracking."
The goal of election map fuckery is to have districts that are all either 100% or 49% opponents, that takes both packing and cracking to make it happen.
Interesting. TIL about cracking.